On the Tremors of Consciousness
He sat in excruciating silence and stared at the whiteboard,
Perturbed by more than a lack of creativity,
the strain of pixel-stained eyes
And the tug of incomplete assignments.
All those things were there, to be sure:
A swirling cocktail of perfectly-average angst.
And yet to call it “perfectly-average” is to do violence
To the particularity and potency of his demons.
Trembling and tremulous he gets up and says “I’ve got to go.”
Blinking adamantly as if to adjust some cognitive lens,
And scrub the world of banality and pain
He slips through the front doors into a cool fall night.
He thinks of David Foster Wallace,
Who wore a bandana to keep his head from exploding.
He thinks that this gets at something like the truth for a certain set of minds
And that perhaps existential anxiety tends to afflict the gifted.
And yet he cannot shake the sense that he has softened something sinister
And transmuted a tragedy into a plot point in his story.
He collapsed onto his bike and peddled gingerly into town,
Screaming into the dark and windy sky.
Without warning his screaming ceased and was replaced with sobs.
His mind browned out and distinctions dissolved,
Replaced by inexplicable and incomprehensible joy.
It was not so much the feeling that things would turn out all right
As it was the incurable conviction that things already were.
Postlude
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Julian of Norwich
On the Benevolence of the Given
He arose at seven and ran along the strip of asphalt that traced the path where the
train used to run.
It was early so the sound and heat and pressure of a mid-May morning
Assaulted his senses and peeled away his slumber, but not unpleasantly.
And there would be no tragedy in the fact that his day dissolved into other obligations,
Or that the weekend section of The Wall Street Journal never left the wicker basket,
And pancakes remained in a wrinkled tin pan until two in the afternoon—
Except that the accumulation of mundane defeats
Of tables left uncleared
And microwaves left uncleaned
And lawns left unmowed
Was too much, this time, for a mind bent towards transcendence.
Of course he didn’t snap, because quiet minds don’t do that.
But evening came and his wife’s words ruptured his thoughts—
“Is something wrong?”
At this he wept bitterly.
And she, sensing the implications of unexpected sobs,
Placed her hands on their wooden bedroom floor and countered
Speaking with an authority not entirely her own
That disappointment and disillusionment were real,
As was the tyranny of the typical.
But so too was the life they’d created.
“I am here. Now.” she screamed.
On the Virtue of Incoherence
The day was cold and the light was flat.
But the cold was not severe enough to be exhilarating,
Nor was the light low enough to suggest an apocalypse.
It was all too banal to support other imaginings
Other seasons, other skies, other landscapes
The fatigue of unspent summer days
Sunburned and salted in ripped shoes squeaky with sand
Or restless spring evenings spent sprinting across asphalt
Resulting in calloused heels pockmarked with pink dots.
And yet he knew that any one of these memories
Could threaten the integrity of every other.
He begged and screamed and scaled the gates of heaven
Looking for some technique or hermeneutic
Some framework for approaching the world
That would let him bind summer to spring and fall to winter
And bring coherence and wholeness
To a world that trafficked in diversity and dissonance
But then one day his wife approached him
With a ladybug on her thumb and a rose resting in her palm
A silent witness to the sanctity of abundance.